UNLOCK the POWER of the CALIBRATION TAB in Lightroom

hey guys this is anthony morganti i am mister photographer.com in this video we're going to talk about what i believe are the most misunderstood and least used group of adjustments that are in lightroom i'm talking about the adjustments that are in the calibration tab now i believe that they're not used that much because many photographers really don't understand what these adjustments do but really once you understand what the calibration does the calibration tab does i think it will open a lot of creative possibilities up for you and it will do some practical things as well for example it will correct a color cast in an image now to really understand the calibration tab we have to talk about cameras for a second let's just pretend that you come upon a scene and you're filthy rich and you have three different cameras from three different manufacturers so you have a canon camera you have a sony camera you have a nikon camera and you take the same exact photo with all three of those cameras what you'll find when you look at the raw files is that each of those images will be slightly different the colors will be slightly different and the highlight shadows ultimately the contrast between each of those images will be a little bit different that's because each of those manufacturers use a specific type of what is commonly called a color science for that camera more specifically it's really a camera profile you may hear i've heard in the past that a lot of photographers might say i really love canon's color science or canon's color profile or nikon's color pro profile or whatever now in the earlier days of digital photography digital cameras really just had one color profile so nikon cameras had their color profile canon had theirs a little later on even sony they just had one maybe two in the early days of sony cameras so you had just one camera profile for all these different cameras and that's why a lot of people grew attached to a specific brand because they like the color from that camera and you know it's subjective it's not really an objective thing and nowadays cameras have multiple profiles built in now for example if we go up to the basic table lightroom we have a profile browser and if i open up that profile browser you can see that there's all different types of profiles there are profiles that are just adobe profiles nothing to do with the camera manufacturer these are just adobe profiles and if i hover over them you'll see that with each profile the colors change slightly and the contrast the highlights and shadows they change just slightly too because the profiles are different and if you're working with a raw file in lightroom you'll also have the camera matching profiles as well this image was shot with the fuji camera so we have different profiles and you can see the colors change slightly the pro contrast change slightly and so on through those different profiles so we have profiles it's really just how the colors are interpreted by the camera or the camera manufacturer now as you probably know a color image is a mix of red green and blue and let's just say you have those same three cameras and you take a photo of a red brick wall and it's just saturated red if you look at the you know theoretically if you looked at those three images from the three different cameras they should look identical but likely they won't the color red will be slightly different between those three cameras so the u will be shifted a little bit between the three cameras and not only that the brightness nothing to do with the exposure let's say you just had perfect exposure on all three cameras the brightness of the actual red brick wall will be slightly different and the saturation of the red will be slightly different that's what that color science is it's how the camera manufacturers interpret a color for you saturation and brightness and then when a color photo has a mixture of red green and blue it tends to make it look different compared to another camera manufacturers what you could do is you could tweak all of that with the calibration tab for example uh i have this image here and you can see that it's got a blue sky right well you would think i could go up to the blue primary and bring saturation down and it would just pull out the color in the blue sky or maybe push it up and it would just saturate the blue sky but you can see it's affecting every single color that's because this color image is a mixture of red green and blue so when you adjust the saturation of the blue primary you're adjusting blue everywhere in the mix so even though this like um building doesn't isn't blue but that color has blue mixed in it so when you change the saturation you're affecting that everywhere if you want to target blue you should go to the hsl panel then you could go to the saturation go to the blue slider and then you'll just mainly affect the blue sky right in the water with that so that's to target that specific color if i want to target those red bricks i could go to the red or maybe even the orange would be a better choice you can see how it's just targeting those bricks so you could target specific colors with the hsl panel but when you're actually want to adjust the mixture of colors then you go to the calibration tab now i mentioned that you could do some practical things also with the calibration tab and one is remove a color cast this image has a distinctive blue color cast and most often you probably go up to the basic tamil uh panel and you'd go to the white balance right and you could try auto and it's way too warm now right go to daylight it's a little better all right cloudy it's way too warm shade's gonna be even warmer and so on so we're not nailing it with that uh we could try the uh eyedropper and what you want to do is click on a neutral color and i'll click on the white of this like whatever that is and that actually isn't bad but it still isn't perfect it's just kind of off a little bit it still looks odd it just doesn't look like it looked when it was there when i was there what you could do is you could use that white balance adjustment to get you close then go to the calibration tab and let's say you know i could try to move these saturations around most often you're not going to want to use the move the hue slider around for this but you could get it to be a little bit more like it actually was when you were there and that looks better that looks like it was a it was a summer day it was actually a spring day there were no boats yet in in the on the docks but it was an early spring day and it was sunny out and it looked more like that maybe there's just a little bit too much red in there i could pull that back and it looks a lot better so that's how you could correct something practical with your image like a color cast but as i mentioned a lot of times we want to do some things creative here so we could go to an image like this and if you go to the calibration tab and we go to blue primary now it's not do you see any blue in this image not really right but if i go to the saturation tab i start moving it to the right look at the greens and the yellows all getting more saturated and i've often in the past i've done a couple videos where i talked about single slider photo pop and that's the saturation slider of blue primary if you move it to the right you tend to make a color image just pop more and you can see that it really is making those colors pop so if you ever have an image that looks a little drab come to the calibration tab and move this blue primary slider to the right now if the green still looks like maybe it's a little too much maybe you could take some of the green down uh like that but you can see how it still kind of makes everything pop a little better and then you could uh mess around with the saturation now on top of that uh we have these u sliders as well let's go to another image that has a lot of blue in it that's this one now we have this uh blue primary now if i'm look at you know the sky's blue the water is blue if i move this to left we're making the blues more cyan if i move it to the far right we're making the blues more magenta so you can see how we could change that hue slightly so if you don't like the hue of something if it doesn't look like it actually looked when you took the photo that's when you're going to want to come in and move the hue slider around often if you take an image and the colors just look off because again these are a mixture of red green and blue come to the calibration tab and move some of these use sliders around and you'll see if you could get a better representation of what that scene was actually like when you were there like for this specific image it it was a nice beautiful summer day and we were at niagara falls obviously and it just wasn't this blue though right so i could come in and i could move some of this around a little bit to try to change the hue a little bit of the mixture of red green and blue the way the hue is mixed together and just make it look a little bit more uh realistic like it was when i was there so you could come and do that that's another practical application of these adjustments that are here now sometimes when you take images the shadows will have usually kind of a bluish tint in them and what you would do is you would go to the shadow slider and you would move this to left it will just take that blue that might be in the shadows part of the image away and that is just a real subtle adjustment as well now one last thing about the calibration tab and this i don't often use but over the years lightroom had different processing engines they used and they've updated it throughout the years you know you could see these version four three two one for example if i go to version one if i go up to the basic tab you can see that we have exposure recovery fill light blacks so all this changed because that was uh those were the adjustments that were used in the original versions of lightroom i think up to lightroom 3 if i'm not mistaken so you have these adjustments so we don't often want to go back and use older adjustments because typically usually with manufacturers as they update a software they're updating it so that it works better so these um adjustments these calibration versions these process versions change you can see here we still have the exposure recovery fill light that actually i think was in uh lightroom three that one if i remember right then we go to version three and this i think uh debuted in um lightroom four and you can see we have the typical highlight shadows whites and blacks and so on so that's that drop down there now typically you're always going to use the one that has current next to it and that's what you'll want to use and then you could adjust your image accordingly so the calibration tab remember it's really just how the colors are interpreted on you know in a raw file or jpeg or tiff or anything really so you have blue well what is the exact u of blue if you want to shift that exact hue a blue you could shift it here but remember it shifts it in the mix as well where blue is mixed with red and green to make a specific color like the cliff wall over here so you're going to adjust all that color as well when you adjust that hue if you want to adjust the saturation too of those individual colors red green and blue you can do that as well so hopefully that will help you use the calibration tab in a more creative way and also in a more practical way as well thank you everyone who watches my videos i really do appreciate it i'll talk to you guys soon you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 25,372

Keywords: morganti, anthony morganti, How To, Tutorial, photo editing, lightroom tutorial, what's new in lightroom, what's new in lightroom classic, tutorial, lightroom editing, lightroom presets, lightroom free, preference in lightroom, lightroom catalog, best lightroom preferences, smart previews, 1:1 previews, lightroom previews, lightroom classic tutorial, adobe lightroom, color cast, calibration tab, camera calibration, camera profile, lightroom profiles, lightroom, how to edit

Id: 7bihEn69qOE

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020